Slashdot Mirror
Dell Adamo Review — Macho Outside, Sissy Inside
Odelia Lee writes with a full review of Dell's new Adamo slimtop over at Gizmodo. While it may have an sleek exterior there are definite gaps (both literal and figurative) in their engineering. "The Adamo is both a compliment and an insult to Dell engineering. It's possibly the most beautiful computer Dell has ever manufactured, but I'm not sure that Dell has caught up to competitors in either aesthetics or power. There have been lots of qualitative Adamo reviews out there, but we got the first of the units that will actually ship to customers, so it's time for real benchmarks. As it happens, performance is really what's at stake here."
Why don't you just wind it down and give the money back to your shareholders? Or stick to servers.
I think the article summary nails it.
Bigger, heavier, louder (which, to me, is half the point of something like the air), integrated battery (just like the air), bad performance, higher price... what's the point?
It's nice looking, but it sounds like an Air is a much better all around computer. The only thing in it's favor is the higher max RAM (Apple will probably change that) and the integrated 3G option (I'd expect Apple to change that too). Gizmodo is also right that nVidia's next chipset for netbooks will outperform this, at 1/5th the price. It has eSata too though, which is a plus.
Nice try Dell. It is certainly very nice visually. But you need some substance to go with that, or at least a cheaper price point.
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
Dell Adamo, for when you want to be pretentious, but you can't afford Apple.
And yes, that website is hideous Flashturbation. I dare you to "encounter," "admire," "discover," or "commit" anything useful about the Adamo on the page. Apple gets credit here for blending marketing and tech specs. Where is the audience for Adamo? They already bought Apple or they're scratching their heads trying to find out how much RAM and CPU it has.
(-1, Raw and Uncut is the only way to read)
The processor speed of the Macbook Air was a lot higher than the Adamo. The Adamo easily outpaced the Lenovo with the same processor speed.
Of course processor speed isn't everything.
The video card is the key here (or so the reviewers would have your believe).
In the real world that this device was meant to operate in, I suspect Joe User would never notice the difference in video performance since its adequate for YouTube.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
Your entire post would make sense if only one thing were true. If this PC weren't MORE expensive than the closest Mac counterpart, you could excuse poor build quality, under-powered processor, and heftiness as merely being good value for dollar. But that's not true. It's MORE EXPENSIVE than the Air. A slim laptop that's more pricey than the already overpriced status symbol that is the Macbook Air, but provides significantly less value? Somebody failed, and failed hard.
Just another "DOJ fascist authoritarian totalitarian bootlicker" -- Zeio
They could give it a gruff exterior, but it would kick the ass of any other computer that got in its way, Apple or Cylon.
and cheaper. 1.2Ghz dual core processor? Wtf? My 2 year old 3lb thinkpad has a 1.8Ghz dual core processor, and I bought it new for half what an Adamo costs 2 years ago. If an Adamo was a cheaper alternative to a thinkpad I could understand, but it's more expensive too! Why would anyone in their right mind buy a Adamo instead of thinkpad?
A lot of us like netbooks precisely because they don't have full size keyboards or screens.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
Adamo commercial
Thank you, Gizmonic, for introducing me to yet another word I expect never to use in polite company. :)
Cheers,
"What in the name of Fats Waller is that?"
"A four-foot prune."
Is anyone else bothered by the fact that the slot for the ATT SIM Card (a more elegant solution than USB device by God!) kind of tilts the playing field in the direction of one vendor? If I were to pay that much for a laptop I would want everything about it to be "general purpose" to the largest extent possible.
"An ounce in the morning is a pound in the evening." - Old hiking adage.
If you're paying good money for laptop that focuses on portability weight is rather important.
At first, you think the people that cut down the handles of their toothbrush to save weight are rather nuts. Then you find out that all their crazy methods of shaving off weight from individual items actually ends up to a noticeable reduction in overall weight.
The same principles applies to more work related traveling. If you can shave off a pound here, a few ounces there, eventually you're commuting with a noticeably lighter load.
This is a genuine question, not a troll. I'm really interested in the answer.
What is the meaning of comparing the GHz as a major factor in evaluation of a laptop? I'm a bioinformatician. I do most of my work on an X40 Thinkpad. For small jobs, this is more than sufficient. For major calculations, one or two cores will not suffice, no matter what the GHz.
From my experience, for most of the tasks, a difference of even 10% in the speed is not an issue, and anyway, there are dozens of other factors that influence both, the real computing speed and the reactivity of the interface. To me, things like memory, disk access, networking, cacheing, usage pattern and last but not least, what software solution you have picked for your task seem to be more influencial on the overall perfomance than a difference between 1.6 or 1.86 GHz. Yet in most comparisons (e.g. several posts here on Slashdot), when talking of a laptop, first two things to mention are the price tag and the GHz.
Question: am I missing something? What is so important about the GHz of the processor to use it as a proxy for "performance"? Is it just historical, or maybe because it is easy to quantify, like in the case of megapixels in digital cameras (which are nowadays mostly meaningless, but easy to compare)?
j.
Yet this brings to mind a fat guy riding an extremely fancy bike.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
A lot of mobile professionals who carry computers in a bag along with, say, documents or books will find "thin" to be at least as important as the other dimensions. For example, a 17" Macbook and a 13" Macbook take up functionally the same amount of space in a messenger bag (1"), which is a lot less than many cheaper computers.
Thin is expensive, and is only worth it if it's actually useful, but sometimes it is truly useful.
That commercial would have been perfect, if only Ricardo Montalban were still with us to tout the "Rich Corinthian Leather" of the Adamo (and hey, they DO talk about leather around 2:17 in the Adamo video).
It could be in a wrist pad...
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
They're competing in a market filled with people BUYING MACBOOK AIRs. They don't need to be intelligent. They just need to look expensive.
Quartz Extreme and Core Image. Are there any other real reasons to spend all that money on generic hardware?